08.Dying to Sin

by Stephen Booth

  ‘They don’t seem to speak English.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  Rain had begun to fall again – big, fat drops splattering on to the roof of her car and pitting the already treacherously soft ground. Around her, uniformed and paper-suited figures speeded up their actions, as if suddenly instilled with a newfound sense of urgency. Within a few minutes, they were all sheltering against the walls of the farmhouse or sitting in their vehicles.

  And it was only then that Fry really noticed Pity Wood Farm for the first time. Until this moment, she’d been concentrating on the ground, trying to keep her footing in the slippery mud that was coating her shoes and trickling in between her toes. But she looked up, and she saw it in all its glory.

  She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere. Mud ran right up to the walls of the outbuildings, and right up to the door of the farmhouse itself. From the evidence, Fry thought it probably continued inside the house, too. The exterior was grimy and flecked with dirt, a bird’s nest trailed from a broken gutter. Piles of rubbish were strewn across the dead grass of what might once have been garden. Was this really a farm?

  ‘Who else is here, Gavin?’ she asked, in despair.

  ‘The DI’s on his way,’ said Murfin. ‘But in the meantime, it’s you and me, boss.’

  ‘DC Cooper?’

  ‘Ben? He’s on a rest day. We don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Fry. ‘This is exactly his sort of place.’

  Crouching uncomfortably, Detective Constable Ben Cooper studied the withered object carefully. In all his years with Derbyshire Constabulary, including seven in CID, he’d never seen anything quite like this. There had been plenty of dead bodies – some of them long dead, others nice and fresh. And some of them perhaps not quite dead, after all. But this?

  The flesh had shrivelled away from the fingers, leaving them thin but not quite skeletal. The fact that there was still a layer of leathery skin shrunk tight to the fingers somehow made it worse than if he was just looking at bones. The result was that the hand appeared to have been shrinkwrapped in a film of wrinkled, yellow plastic. The thumb was bent strangely out of shape, too, as though it had been broken and never re-set. The severed wrist was ragged, and the tattered skin looked as though it had been sealed with some kind of sticky substance.

  He straightened up, easing the painful muscles in his back. He’d been playing squash this morning, and his opponent had smashed the ball into his kidneys when he was out of position recovering a drop-shot. You could never trust police officers not to get you in the back.

  ‘The hand of glory,’ he said. ‘They’re very rare these days.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Very rare. Not rare like steak, but rare as in very unusual. There aren’t many of them about.’

  Cooper had the suspicion that he was babbling, spouting nonsense. He did it just because there was a silence that had to be filled. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. Not even the first time today.

  He looked at his companion, unsure of her reaction because of the silence. ‘What do you think of it, then?’

  ‘It’s gross.’

  ‘Gross?’

  ‘Like, totally yucky.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  It wasn’t exactly a technical assessment – but accurate, all the same. There were many occasions when a police officer in E Division might want to use it. A Saturday night on drunk patrol, for example. Another body lying in the gutter on the High Street? I’m not touching that, Control – it’s yucky. Yes, that would work.

  But today was his rest day, and he’d volunteered to take his eldest niece out for the day, since the Christmas holidays had started. So he had an obligation to be interesting and informative. Volunteered? Was that really the right word? His recollection was that he’d happened to be hanging around at Bridge End Farm chatting to his brother Matt, when Amy had kidnapped him. But he’d never prove that in court. He had no evidence.

  ‘The “hand of glory” supposedly comes from an executed criminal and was cut off the body while the corpse was still hanging from the gibbet,’ said Cooper, reading from the guide book.

  ‘There’s a recipe here,’ said Amy, interrupting him. She was eleven now, and strangely adult in some ways. Cooper was starting to feel sorry for the teachers at Amy’s new school. She could be merciless if you were boring her.

  ‘A what, Amy?’

  ‘A recipe.’

  ‘Like Delia Smith? That sort of recipe?’

  ‘I suppose. “The recipe for the preparation of a hand of glory is simple,” it says.’

  Cooper looked down at his niece, surprised by the sudden change in her tone. Now she was interested. It was yucky just to stand and look at a preserved hand, but learning how to preserve one yourself – now that was cool. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.

  ‘“Squeeze the blood out of the hand. Embalm it in a shroud and steep it in a solution of saltpetre, salt and pepper for two weeks. Then dry in the sun.” What’s saltpetre, Uncle Ben?’

  ‘Erm … I’m not sure.’

  Amy snorted gently. ‘“The other essential item is a candle made from hanged man’s fat, wax and Lapland sesame.” What’s Lapland sesame?’

  ‘Erm …’

  ‘Sesame seeds from Lapland, obviously.’ She frowned. ‘Do sesame plants grow in Lapland?’

  ‘I, er …’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘I know how the hand of glory was used,’ said Cooper desperately. ‘You fixed candles between the fingers of the hand, and then you lit them when you broke into a house.’

  ‘When you did what?’

  ‘Well, it was used by burglars. According to the legends, it made them invisible. It was also supposed to prevent the owners of the house from waking up.’

  There was a final bit on the little interpretative panel that he didn’t bother reading out. Wicks for the candles were made from locks of hair dipped in grease from the murderer’s body and the fat of an old tom cat, then consecrated by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Ah, the old Lord’s Prayer backwards – that always worked, didn’t it?

  They moved on through the museum. Cooper glanced out of the window, and saw that it was still raining. He didn’t mind Edendale in the rain, but Amy objected to getting wet. And since it was the start of her Christmas holidays, and only his rest day, she got to say what they did and where they went. And that didn’t involve going out in the rain, thanks.

  In the centre of town, Victoria Park had been taken over for a Victorian Christmas Market. These things seemed to be very popular, judging by the crowds coming into town. There was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air, and the sound of a fairground organ. And there was an innovation for Edendale this year – a Continental market, where stalls sold French bread and German sausages. Some of the stallholders spoke with foreign accents and might even be French or German. You never knew these days.

  In the evenings, mime artists, stilt walkers and clowns would mingle with the crowds, and Santa would turn up on his sleigh at exactly the same time every night. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV presenter had been brought in to switch on the lights, but the headline act on the main stage tomorrow would be an Abba tribute band.

  They stopped by a costume display. The rough trousers and leather knee-pads of a lead miner, the gowns and bonnets of an elegant lady.

  ‘So how are you liking school, Amy?’ he said, aware of an unfamiliar silence developing.

  ‘It’s so cliquey. They’re all goths or emos. Or chavs.’

  ‘Chavs, eh?’

  ‘They’re so stupid. There aren’t any real people, Uncle Ben.’

>   ‘Would you rather be at home, or at school?’

  ‘Well, home is all right. I like being around the farm and the animals. But Mum and Dad are so immature sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, are they?’

  ‘They only think about money and possessions – they’re very materialistic. I can’t believe they never stop and think about serious subjects now and then.’

  Cooper found himself trailing after his niece, as if he was the child demanding attention. It was supposed to be the other way round, but it never seemed to work like that in reality.

  ‘Well, they’re very busy looking after you and Josie,’ he said. ‘And they have to try to make sure the farm makes enough money to support the whole family. It’s very hard work, you know.’

  Amy didn’t seem to hear. He could see that she was thinking about something again. It was very unnerving the way she did that, switched to auto pilot while her brain concentrated on some totally different subject. Perhaps she was already learning to multi-task, practising that skill all women claimed to have.

  ‘It’s just like Draco Malfoy, in that shop in Knockturn Alley,’ she said.

  Cooper frowned, stumped again by the turn of the conversation. ‘Is it?’

  His brain turned over, trying to pin down the reference. It was humiliating to find that his brain worked so much more slowly than Amy’s but he was finding it more and more difficult to keep up with his nieces’ interests these days. Their lives seemed to change so quickly, the pop stars they liked being different from one week to the next. Even the language they used evolved so rapidly that it left him behind.

  ‘Wait a minute – Draco Malfoy, did you say? That’s Harry Potter.’

  ‘Of course it’s Harry Potter.’ Amy could barely conceal the contempt in her voice. ‘It’s in The Chamber of Secrets. Draco Malfoy finds a hand of glory when he’s in the shop with his father. “Best friend of thieves and plunderers,” that’s what the shopkeeper says.’

  ‘“Best friend of thieves and plunderers.” OK, that would make sense.’

  ‘So it’s magic,’ said Amy.

  ‘Yes, of course. What did you think it was?’

  ‘I thought it was for real. Well, it’s in the museum, isn’t it? All this other stuff is for real – the costumes and the tools, and the old furniture.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the hand of glory isn’t real – it’s magic.’

  ‘It’s a genuine hand,’ said Cooper defensively. ‘A hand that belonged to a real person once.’

  ‘But it’s still magic. Magic is make-believe. Harry Potter is made up. It’s fiction, Uncle Ben.’

  ‘The fact is,’ said Cooper, treading cautiously, ‘people in the past believed those things were for real. They didn’t know that magic was just something out of stories like Harry Potter. They actually thought it worked, in real life. The hand of glory, all kinds of stuff.’

  They got to the door of the museum and looked out on to the street. There were fewer umbrellas being carried by the pedestrians now, so the rain must be easing.

  ‘People can be really weird, can’t they?’ said Amy. ‘They believe in such stupid things.’

  The old man’s dreams were worse during the day. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hardly aware of his surroundings, pressed down into the darkness of sleep by a great weight. At times, he wasn’t even sure he was still alive, it felt so impossible to wake up. It was so difficult, so far beyond his strength.

  Our dawns and dusks are numbered. They’ll steal our land next, and our hills. I always thought the place would last for ever, but now I don’t care. I wouldn’t pass on the curse. It’ll die with me, and none too soon. It will an’ all.

  Dark filth, cruel brutes. Coming to my home for their evil purposes, stealing away my life. Our life. They turned up in their white vans, and they went away again. Dark, some of them. Speaking in tongues. They might as well have had the number stamped on their foreheads. Them and their minions, traipsing all over the shop. A load of rammel in the sheds, I don’t know what …

  Words and phrases repeated in his head, meaningless yet desperately important, the only thing that mattered.

  For he that is dead. For he that is dead.

  Aye, it were silin’ down again. That morning, he was fast on, so I didn’t waken him. He’d only be lorping around the house, the old dosser. Yammering about his mad ideas. Sacrilege and superstition, damnation and desecration.

  The night before, they’d all been popped-up again. I thought I’d go scranny if they didn’t stop. Look, he’s a wick ’un, I said. I told you he was a wick ’un.

  The old man opened his eyes for a moment, aware of movement and light, but sank back into sleep before his brain could focus.

  But he was sickly, and always was. Weak in the head, and sick in the body. Sound, me. I’m sound, I always said. But him, he was badly. I never cottoned on how badly. But it makes no odds now, does it? It’s all for the best, in the end.

  For he that is dead.

  For he that is dead.

  For he that is dead is freed from sin.

  2

  A single hair follicle was enough to make a DNA match. Polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeats could get a result from one head hair, or even an eyelash. Invisible stains would work, too. Stains of saliva. Tears and blood.

  Watching the activity at Pity Wood Farm, Diane Fry despaired of being able to rely on modern scientific techniques. Even the fingerprints Jamie Ward had left on his spade a few hours ago would have bloomed in the damp atmosphere and become useless.

  Yet more vehicles had arrived at the scene, jockeying for parking places on the drier patches of ground. They were wasting their time, because there wouldn’t be a dry inch left by the end of the day. Even now, the sound of spinning wheels whined in the air as a driver churned another rut into the mud.

  ‘Well, I see the builders have trampled all over the job long before we got here.’

  Fry turned to see Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens approaching the inner cordon, casually clad in jeans and green wellington boots, as if he’d only popped out to walk the dog on a Sunday afternoon.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Morning, Diane.’ He looked down at the sea of mud. ‘That’s just great. What a start. But I suppose it makes a change from our own plods doing the trampling.’

  ‘Does it? I can’t see any difference from where I’m standing. All size-twelve boots look the same to me. I’m not bothered what type of helmets they were wearing when they were doing the trampling. It’s not as if they were bouncing around on their heads, is it?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘If we found an imprint of a Derbyshire Constabulary cap badge in the mud, that would be a different matter,’ said Fry. ‘Then we’d be looking for some uniformed idiot who’d tripped over his own feet. And we’d have a list of potential suspects right under our noses.’

  Hitchens laughed. ‘Shall we have a look at the centre of all this attention?’

  With DC Murfin trailing reluctantly behind, they followed a line of wooden planks borrowed from the builders to create a temporary bridge. Their feet thumped on the planks as if they were walking out on to a pier at the seaside. Blackpool, with mud.

  And here was the end-of-the-pier show – a sort of gipsy fortune teller lurking in her shadowy tent, consulting the bones.

  The Home Office pathologist, Mrs van Doon, straightened up as they approached. She brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt from her glove across her temple.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about contamination of your crime scene,’ she said. ‘This body has been here long enough for half the population of Derbyshire to have passed through the area on their way to the pub and back again.’

  Murfin looked suddenly interested. ‘There’s a pub?’

  ‘In the village,’ said the pathologist, gesturing with a trowel. ‘About a mile in that direction.’

  Hitchens grunted impatiently. �
�How long has it been here exactly?’

  ‘Exactly? Is that a joke, Inspector?’

  ‘Make an estimate, then. We won’t hold you to it.’

  ‘On that understanding …’ Mrs van Doon gave an apologetic shrug. ‘A year or so? I assume you’ll be getting the forensic anthropologist in to examine the remains. Dr Jamieson might be able to give you a better estimate.’

  ‘At first glance, the body looks pretty well preserved to me,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Oh, you’re looking at the hand. Well, the hand isn’t too badly decomposed, that’s true. But it had been well covered up and protected from the air – at least, before some individual stuck the edge of a spade through the plastic sheeting. There are some old rips in the covering at the head end, though. So the condition of that area of the body is a bit different.’

  ‘At the head end? That sounds like bad news. What are our chances of an ID going to be?’

  Mrs van Doon shrugged in her scene suit, rustling faintly. ‘It’s too early to say. But I can tell you the victim has lost quite a bit of flesh on the left side. Down to the bone in places. I’ll know more when I can get her back to the mortuary. That might take a bit of time, though.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We need to be careful digging her out. Some of the skin is sloughing off, and the less of her we lose at this stage, the better. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘It is a “her”, though,’ said Fry. ‘You did say “her”.’

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure of that, Sergeant,’ said the pathologist, her boots squelching as she squatted to peer into the hole. ‘Unless you’ve got a cross-dresser with a penchant for tights and blue skirts on your missing persons list.’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘I’ll pass the remains into Dr Jamieson’s care when he arrives. We can consult later, when she’s safely in the lab.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

  As they re-crossed the plank bridge, Hitchens cast an eye over the farm buildings.

  ‘What do we know about the occupants?’

  ‘Apparently, the farm was owned by two elderly brothers,’ said Murfin, producing a notebook and demonstrating that he’d actually been doing some work while everyone else was standing around gassing. ‘One of them died quite recently, and the other is in a care home in Edendale.’